Vampire - Habent Sua Fata Libelli- By Hanns Heinz Ewers

Habent Sua Fata Libelli Books Have Their Destinies This is especially true of this book before it was printed. The manuscript was completed December 1916 in Seville, Spain. H.H.E. sent it out on a Norwegian ship back to Germany. While the ship, Der Kapitän, was in port in Brest, France, the French confiscated the manuscript and destroyed it. H.H.E. then sent a heavily reworked copy from New York in the spring of 1917. A Mr. R out of Wein attempted to carry it along with other secret papers back to Germany. He was travelling as a steward on a Swedish streamer and had been suspected of carrying secret messages for a long time. The English arrested him in Kirkwall, but never found the papers that he had hidden on the ship. After five months of fruitless searching and investigating the British authorities let the dangerous man go. They brought him back to the same ship that was now again on its way back to America. He recovered all of his things safely from the hiding place thinking to faithfully resume his activities and deliver the papers. Shortly after this Mr. R was taken into custody by the American authorities and all of his things confiscated, the manuscript as well. He was released a 2nd time, but the investigation continued late into the summer of 1918. Happily, he was finally able to lie his way out of that and through a fortunate coincidence managed to get several of his things back including the manuscript. He buried it with other documents in a box in his garden in the Bronx. H.H.E. searched through half a dozen homes trying to rescue a 3rd copy he had entrusted to an American secretary, Frl.J.I., for safekeeping. The authorities searched her house, but she had passed it on to an Irish Lady that she had befriended. The agents soon came there as well. It was being burned in a back room as the tracker dogs of the Ministry of Justice were searching for it in the front rooms of her home. In the meantime H.H.E. had been taken into custody. In every interrogation the question of the manuscript “Vampire” was the central point. A couple chapters had been published in a Spanish book and the English Secret Service knew about it. They had been observing H.H.E. since 1914 and had communicated all of his moves and activities to the American authorities. While he was often questioned for hours about the Vampire manuscript, The Fatherland, a German propaganda newsletter, lay cozy and snug in the same room beautifully wrapped in brown wrapping paper in the filing cabinet under the letter “R”. God knows what dangerous ideas were contained in it!

H.H.E. believed, by the way, that the manuscript had long since arrived in Germany and could only assure the inquisitors that it was not in his possession. The manuscript was considered so pernicious by the authorities that they put it on the “Index” of banned books. It was considered a very serious violation to have or publish one of these books. If you had one you were supposed to confess and turn it over to the authorities immediately. A year later in the summer of 1919 after an unsympathetic stay in a prison, penitentiary and concentration camp, H.H.E. found himself once more in New York enjoying a restricted freedom when he bumped into Mr. R again. Mr. R had dug up his treasures and brought the manuscript back to him. By now the single surviving manuscript was only as free as he was. His parole was under the stipulation not to publish neither in the United States nor in any other land, neither in English nor in any other language, neither privately nor officially, neither directly nor indirectly, and so on… You can see how efficient the American authorities are when they have something at all intellectual to suppress! H.H.E. had been censored in Berlin and Wien, in St. Petersburg, Rome and Paris, but never as completely as he was in the United States at this time. In addition, he was not allowed to leave the country and kept under constant surveillance. Now he is finally back in Europe and enjoying a degree of personal freedom and free speech, at least as much as is currently permitted in Democratically governed countries. The French, the English and the Americans have done their best to destroy this book as well as the person that wrote it. That they didn’t was fate. Perhaps fate also helped in saving the chapter Carnelian that had been cut up by a scorpion, and as in the chapter Beryl helped in his many moves during those years, giving him strength and character. Both of which gave him a beautiful woman. Naples, 7 July, 1920